TECHNOLOGY ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION: Part 3 of 3

BK: We're still judging kids' abilities to write stories. As children interact daily with technology, they're exposed to hypertext, video and more. We're trying to bring in these technologies to improve writing skills. The quality of ideas is much better. Teachers are focused on working with the richness of children's mental processes. Kids now have a large palette to work with, while the principles of composition, communication and interaction are the same. SG: When I ask a 15-year-old if they are tech-savvy, they answer, "No, I'm not; I've got friends who are more technical than I am." Ironically, if they sit down in front of any interface, such as a gaming consul or piece of software they've never seen before, they can use it in seconds. Our perceptions of what is technically literate are completely different. Even having a good discussion about how technology can be used well is difficult - the language doesn't even exist in some cases. JM: Not in most universities. The pre-service teachers in the faculty of education who are going to teach in schools come straight from university. These young people understand thefundamental uses of technology for learning. On their first school assignment, they might not have access to the school's network and can only use software applications approved by the school district, which they may not have any knowledge of. They have two weeks to impress their host teacher, who is operating from a very traditional perspective, about how to teach effectively in the classroom. If they ask their host teacher for something above and beyond a VCR for part of their lesson, that host may have to jump through hoops they may not understand. That doesn't take away the responsibility of post-secondary institutions to put pressure on the ministry of education and say, "This is a set of core competencies that we think every teacher should have to be effective in the classroom." When our teachers-in-training go into the school district, they should, at a bare minimum, be expected to demonstrate how effective they are in the classroom by having access to a range of resources, tools and services. Right now there isn't that kind of understanding. We can't expect a teacher to fully understand the power that a computer has in a classroom if they don't get to use one for professional purposes.